[Illustration: Philosophers on Mount Olympus.]



MEDIAEVAL LORE FROM BARTHOLOMEW ANGLICUS

BY ROBERT STEELE

WITH PREFACE BY WILLIAM MORRIS

"WHEN HOLY WERE THE HAUNTED FOREST BOUGHS,
HOLY THE AIR, THE WATER, AND THE FIRE."
KEATS.




PREFACE

It is not long since the Middle Ages, of the literature of which this
book gives us such curious examples, were supposed to be an
unaccountable phenomenon accidentally thrust in betwixt the two
periods of civilisation, the classical and the modern, and forming a
period without growth or meaning--a period which began about the time
of the decay of the Roman Empire, and ended suddenly, and more or less
unaccountably, at the time of the Reformation. The society of this
period was supposed to be lawless and chaotic; its ethics a mere
conscious hypocrisy; its art gloomy and barbarous fanaticism only; its
literature the formless jargon of savages; and as to its science, that
side of human intelligence was supposed to be an invention of the time